Varnish 4.0, Erlang/OTP 17.0 and Rails 4.1.0 – Snippets

Fresh Varnish: Varnish Cache, a popular HTTP reverse proxy, has had version 4.0 released – version 3.0 came out two and a half years ago. The new version can now cache streamed objects, refetch expired objects in the background and security has been hardened up. There’s also a new query language to help dig through Varnish’s extensive logs.

Erlang Enhanced: Version 17.0 of Erlang/OTP has been published – The new version of the languag –, renown for its support for concurrency, high availability and scalability – and its middleware libraries (the OTP) now runs on OSE, a POSIX compliant multicore real-time and fault tolerant operating system. Other changes include an experimental Maps dictionary data type, more “natural mappings” for ASN.1, new options for sockets and many enhancements to the run-time system.

Rails Renewed: The release of Rails 4.1.0 brings a new preloader, variant templates, enums for status (rather than multiple booleans) and mailer previews to the Rails framework. There’s also a useful enhancement to security in that passwords and the like are being moved out to secrets.yml. A run through of the 4.1 features give more info.